ARBON- Floris Storm
The wedding of Stannis Baratheon and Janna Tyrell would stuff Dragonstone to the gills, each house attempting to astound by the number of bannermen they could draw. Even the restive Florents would gather, the snubbed Selyse, the comely Delena, and the maiden Rhea, each brought to witness what their house had lost. In some other world, Rhea might, after a few years, have joined her elder sister Melessa in marriage and gone to be Lady of the Hightower.
That was, however, not to be. Drawn up in the bridal celebrations, young enough to care more for the grandeur of the ball than the humiliation of her house, Rhea would catch the eye of a drunken Robert Baratheon. Some hours later, she would be with child. Lord Florent would quickly arrange the marriage of his grandchild to his household knight, Hosman Norcross.
From this doubled humiliation would be born Floris Storm (f!Edric), a bastard whose features matched her upbringing. Her father’s broad build doubled with awkward lank, her mother’s great ears beneath black Baratheon curls, and smack in the centre the great beak of her grandmother, the lady Crane.
Jon Arryn would arrange for the child to foster with her uncle at Storm’s End, still half a child himself, and Cortnay Penrose, a ward yet older than his Lord. Loras Tyrell came to squire for young Renly , and with him the court at Highgarden sent its occasional regards. Only after much grovelling from Brightwater would her mother be permitted to visit.
Yet it was from her Grandmother that would receive her greatest gift. Regardless of the young lord’s efforts, she was a bastard in a house of nobles, a woman in a keep without a lady. What Storm’s end did permit her though, was the freedom to wander the long summer in the moors by Shipbreaker’s stony shore, to loose the great pressure by her heart and call out, not with the screech of a lady’s hawk, but the heralds trumpet of the cranes, returning in great flying wings west.
